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Monday Catch-Up: The Pope to Resign

Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign on Feb. 28 because he was simply too infirm to carry on — the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years. The decision sets the stage for a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March.

The 85-year-old pope announced his decision in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals on Monday morning.

He emphasized that carrying out the duties of being pope — the leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide — requires “both strength of mind and body.”

Above all we should have gratitude in our hearts. Gratitude to God for his continued guidance of the church, and of course, gratitude to Pope Benedict for his many years of ministry in leading the Church of Christ. This is a decision of tremendous self-knowledge and trust, and above all, courage.

Many questions remain, but they will be answered in time. The few answers that are know as of this writing – The Holy Father (title?) will remove himself on feb. 28th to Castel Gandalfo while a monastery in the Vatican is completed. Pope Benedict is teaching us once again by his example, offering a life dedicated completely to God in prayer.

A conclave of the 114 eligible Cardinals will be set to be convened in March, with a new Holy Father by the end of March. Together, let us all place the Cardinal-Electors in the hands of the Blessed mother who protects and loves us.

“We are sad that he will be resigning but grateful for his eight years of selfless leadership as successor of St. Peter. He delighted our beloved United States of America when he visited Washington and New York in 2008. As a favored statesman he greeted notables at the White House. As a spiritual leader he led the Catholic community in prayer at Nationals Park, Yankee Stadium and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As a pastor feeling pain in a stirring, private meeting at the Vatican nunciature in Washington, he brought a listening heart to victims of sexual abuse by clerics.”

You have to read this Reuters piece to believe it. The determination to put the worst possible spin on everything this brilliant and compassionate uniter accomplished during his short tenure as Pope is breathtaking. Most ridiculous is Reuters’ premise that holding to Church doctrine is a de facto bad thing:

Ratzinger issued a firm Vatican denunciation of homosexuality and gay marriage in 1986.

He brought pressure in the 1990s against theologians, mostly in Asia, who saw non-Christian religions as part of God’s plan for humanity.

A 2004 document sternly denounced “radical feminism” as an ideology that undermined the family and obscured the natural differences between men and women.

He was only to be an interim pope; a placeholder. That’s what was said of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger upon his election to the papacy in 2005. Instead, over the course of eight short years, he left an indelible mark as a leader of thought and unity. His greatest legacy will probably be his theological scholarship. But a close second will be his attempts to bring Catholics together, integrating the Latin Tridentine Mass, reaching out to the Eastern Orthodox, and even opening a dialogue with the Society of Pius X. He was famously taciturn, but expanded the Church’s ministry and started the first papal Twitter account. He was a dogmatic traditionalist, but inspired many with the openness and suppleness of his thought.

I guess yet another Italian pope is just what the Catholic Church needs.

Pope Benedict XVI’s successor will be named in March, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Monday after the pope’s shock announcement he was quitting February 28, ANSA reported.

“There will be a new pope in March” Father Lombardi said.

So who who is Scola.

1. After the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Scola was considered to be among the papabili in the 2005 papal conclave. Sr?a Trifkovi? supported him vigorously in Chronicles because he saw him as the only man who might reverse what Vatican insiders see as the decay of European culture. The conclave elected Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

2. Scola is the author of numerous theological and pedagogical works on topics such as bio-medical ethics, theological anthropology, human sexuality and marriage and the family, which have been translated into several different languages. In addition, he is the author of more than 120 articles published in scholarly journals of philosophy and theology.

3. He founded the Studium Generale Marcianum, an academic institute, and the journal Oasis, published in Italian, English, French, Arabic and Urdu as an outreach to Christians in the Muslim world.

via Matthew Balan at Newsbusters, this vulgar gang of MSNBC liberals denigrating me over my critique of Obamacare — not by answering any of my policy points, but by making crude jokes about my appearance and body parts…

JIM WARD: Did she need a colonoscopy to pull that out of her ass? (Lavoie and Miller laugh) Is there insurance for that?

CHRIS LAVOIE: Someone on your Facebook page just said, dear Michelle Malkin, your colon is not a fact checker, no many how many of your ignorant statements you pull out of your ass. (Lavoie and Ward laugh)

…Miller played the Malkin soundbite twice in the first hour of her program, first during a segment with Democratic Party strategist Karl Frisch, and again minutes later as she talked to Current TV correspondent Jacki Schechner, who once was the communications director for the pro-ObamaCare coalition Health Care for America Now. Ward’s colonoscopy line came during the Frisch segment.

A handicapped woman in western Ohio has to battle the freezing winter weather this weekend because she refused to allow the local power company to install a “smart meter” on her property.

Brenda Hawk has a pacemaker for her heart and because her brain was injured in a car accident, she requires a breathing machine in order to sleep at night. She does not want the new radio-frequency emitting meter because of the health problems these devices have been said to cause. But American Electric Power AEP-Ohio, the local power company, has persisted in their push to swap out Hawk’s analog meter and replace it with the new one.

TheBlaze spoke with Hawk on Saturday. At the time, she was using a kerosene heater to stay warm in the freezing weather. Hawk gave us a basic timeline on the story.

In October of last year, a utility worker arrived on her property and announced that he had removed her old analog power meter and replaced it with a new one. Hawk told him that she had not approved the meter swap and requested that the old one be restored. A series of phone calls between Hawk, the power company and the sheriff’s office was enough to get the new meter pulled out and the old one re-installed.

Fast forward to Jan. 24, 2013. A certified letter from AEP executive Ralph Rocca, Jr. arrived at Hawk’s home announcing that she would be getting a new meter or her power would be cut off. Her efforts to contact Rocca were not successful. All that Hawk wanted was a guarantee from the company that the new meter’s electrical signals would not interfere with her pacemaker. The company could not give her that assurance and it was her position that unless and until they did, no “smart meter” would be installed.

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UPDATE:

We are pleased to report that less than three hours after we reported on this story, a utility crew returned to Ms. Hawk’s home and reestablished her electrical power. In a phone conversation with the very happy homeowner, we learned that many Blaze readers had also reached out and tried to help her by contacting various government agencies. Apparently, switchboards at the state Capitol and senior service agencies were flooded with calls on her behalf. Brenda very modestly asked that we thank everyone “who wasted their Saturday on me.”

As many of you are aware my legal tussle, the fallout from our victory over Section 13 (1), with Richard Warman continues. Warman is suing for libel, largely for comments made by multiple readers. Trial is approaching in the New Year and anticipated costs will be be very significant, as in several 10’s of thousands.

While I take no pleasure in asking for your help I must if we are to continue to fight. If everyone who visits this blog on a daily basis were to donate 20 Dollars our situation would be vastly improved.

If you enjoy reading Blazingcatfur please donate, your help is needed.

I want to thank all of you for your ongoing support, it means a great deal to both K and I. It isn’t always an easy task to provide a forum such as this where the voices of ordinary people can be heard without fear or censure. I will keep on keeping on so long as you want me.

The main purpose of US President Barack Obama’s visit to Israel in the spring is to warn Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against attacking Iran, unnamed officials told Army Radio on Sunday.

According to the officials, the urgency of the trip is because in his speech to the United Nations in September, Netanyahu had flagged the spring of 2013 as a significant time in the context of the Iranian nuclear threat.

I thought this President had an aversion to “meddling with other State’s affairs. How about “leading from behind” on this one, O?

So what do you think Senator Barack Obama would have said if President George W. Bush had pursued these policies? And how do you think the press and the political class would have reacted?

Let me suggest as well that a man who feels wholly at ease with drone strikes that have killed American citizens suspected of engaging in terrorist activities without the benefit of a trial and which have, in the process, killed hundreds of innocent people should be a tad bit more careful when it comes to lecturing about the immorality of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). Joe Scarborough, for example, argued that what Bush did with EITs is “child’s play” compared to what Obama has done.

To put things in a slightly different way: During the 2008 campaign and much of the early part of his presidency, Barack Obama obsessively argued that waterboarding all of three individuals–September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and senior al-Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri–was a violation of human rights and a grave moral offense. Here’s the thing, though: unlike Mr. Obama’s drone strikes, no American citizens, no terrorists and no innocent children have died due to waterboarding. Yet the president’s press spokesman is defending Mr. Obama’s policies as “legal,” “ethical,” and “wise.”

Which leads me to two conclusions. The first is that it’s not always easy to navigate the murky waters of law, morality, and war and terrorism, at least when you’re in the White House and have an obligation to protect the country from massive harm. (After they were revealed, I had several long conversations with White House colleagues trying to sort through the morality of waterboarding and indefinite detention.)

The second is that it is true that there is a serious argument to be made that during wartime targeting terrorists, including Americans, with drones is justified. But that justification probably best not come from someone who has spent much of the last half-dozen years or so sermonizing against waterboarding, accusing those who approved such policies of trashing American ideals and shredding our civil liberties, and portraying himself as pure as the new-driven snow. Because any person who did so would be vulnerable to the charge of moral preening and moral hypocrisy.

Jason Kissner recently questioned President Obama’s whereabouts in spring 1982, and also discussed in passing some of the courses Obama took while at Columbia. In response, I would like to try my hand at reconstructing the Columbia part of Obama’s college transcript based on the published record and my own knowledge of Columbia’s requirements as an ’84 graduate of the college. This reconstruction may be of interest to those who are curious about this part of Obama’s undergraduate education, and it may also shed light on where Obama must have been in spring 1982.

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I was in one of the classes that Obama took at Columbia, the course in Modern Fiction with Edward Said. It is worth noting that my recollection of that class does not square with some of the details recounted by Obama’s friend and roommate Phil Boerner in Maraniss (449-450) and elsewhere.

The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie, several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.There is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing. Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.”No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

“Personally,” his wife told me recently, “I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,” when her husband joined ST6.